Heavy quark production at HERA and its relevance for the LHC

TL;DR

This paper discusses how HERA data on heavy quark production, especially beauty and charm, informs LHC experiments by improving understanding of parton densities, hard scatter processes, and fragmentation, with a focus on current status and theoretical descriptions.

Contribution

It highlights the relevance of HERA heavy quark production data for LHC analyses and reviews the current understanding and theoretical modeling of beauty production.

Findings

NLO QCD generally describes beauty production well

Some phase space regions, like low p_T, show discrepancies

HERA data can improve parton density functions for LHC

Abstract

The import of HERA data on heavy quark production for LHC experiments is discussed. Knowlegde of all aspects of the beauty and charm production process, viz. the parton density functions of colliding hadrons, the hard scatter, and the fragmentation of the quarks into hadrons, can aid LHC experimentation. This short write-up concentrates on possible influences HERA data can have and on the current status (and history) of beauty production from both HERA and Tevatron experiments. In general, next-to-leading order QCD gives a reasonable description of beauty production although some regions of phase space such as low p_T show indications of differences.